I don't believe Apple or anyone in the growing ecosystem will beat me to the ultimate health hardware--personalized body scaffold for multisensory payloads to scan, image, analyze the whole/total body's skin, hair and nail including the oral cavity. What the industry needs is a 100-YR Health Management Solution that forms the basis for a bloodline or bloodgraph that shifts the paradigm of what the average person during his/her 100-YR lifetime observes, orients, decides and acts with respect to every aspect of his/her health while alive and what's revealed during postmortem disposition of blood relatives. The UI/UX thought to keep the parents then child and possibilty caretaker of that child turned senior citizen addicted to comprehenisive health management (i.e., SMART goal setting, planning, scheduling, monitoring, telemetering, rendering/streaming, archiving and analyzing) is a whole-body, true-color, living avatar of the individual derived from daily body surface scans and images binded to an estimated skeleton (and musculature).

Basically, everyone becomes a continuous learner of germane health knowledge given their addiction to their digital double that interacts with them graphically, semantically and acoustically. Haptic interfaction is intended too but those interfaces are rarer. There will be a paradigm shift from businesses to individuals making money from their health data. With more consumerization of medical devices and more usage of them in the right configuration during more of the day throughout a 100-YR lifetime, individuals know have the equivalent of interest bearing financial accounts filled with their trusted goals, plans to achieve them, measurements of acting and annotations of the variances. The development of software for governmental, commercial and academic organizations to comput on these data sets to reduce cycle times and increase throughtput of the relationships they seek with the citizenry will become a new industry for profit making. Just think of applying to schools, dating, security investigations, etc. having an upload or permission to query limited element-attribute pairs in your health schema!?! Scary for some and a dream for others.

As a developer at a hospital/group practice system, this announcment came at a perfect time. We are currently looking at different avenues to achive increased Patient Access and Involvement to improve the Patient Experience. This will be one option that we will explore to see if it will solve a growing problem. It may not be the one-item-cures-all we are hoping to find/buy/develop, but it sure is looking good so far. I will be honest and say I had wished it wasn't Epic who had partnered first with Apple, but maybe that will kickstart GE Healthcare and the other bigger healthcare vendors to start looking at the potential so when I call the support people, they don't act as if this is a foreign concept to them. I do think the early adopters have a chance to get to market first...but we also will be the first to hit all the pot holes in the road to get there. From the presentations I saw about Apple's HelathKit, the apps will need to have explicit permission (from the patient) to access the patient's data, and that is on a data type by data type basis (can I have your age? can I have your weight? can I have your calories burned? that sort of access). So, patients will be in control of what each app that uses the HealthKit can have. And patients are using the app for a specific reason. There is always the option of not using the app. It will be up to the app developers to make sure the patients know what is going to happen to the data (sent to the provider, added to their EMR/EHR, collected for aggregate/anonymous statistics, whatever).

There is potential for great use and there is potential for misuse, just like any new technology. It will be up to the developers to use the new power for the greater good, and by that I do not mean the proffitibility of the organization but the health of the patients! I look forward to seeing where this new development (pun intended) will take me.

As an individual involved with healthcare information for the past thirty years, I have seen much. That said, interoperability has never been achieved to this point regardless of which product platform a hospital, healthcare provider, or health system has chosen to implement. I too have strong concerns about the data that is to be collected about my health along with just what will they be doing with it! If you have employer-sponsored health coverage, will they be monitoring your sleep patterns, "not getting enough exercise", etc. excluding you from certain benefits and coverage? Will this be a forced acceptance of new technology? One last thought, how long do you believe an individual will take the time to do the inputting of information from their mobile device?

Totally. I think we could talk for hours about all the reasons HealthVault hasn't succeeded (and Google Health didn't succeed) and why the category hasn't thrived. But really the biggest reason is they didn't solve a real pain point—they were neither automatic nor universal nor mobile. They're data warehouses.

^^ I wrote a bit more on this at http://qr.ae/Ikgpm

Not to say that was all their fault. HIPAA and Meaningful Use didn't yet have the teeth they do now, and so hospitals and clinics hadn't adopted EMRs and patient portals as prevalently. The data still is nowhere free today, but those at least are early steps that allow the data to start becoming free.

All of which is a long way to say: this is why I founded Prime. I watched sick friends and family members try to aggregate their health records from all their specialists rather than focus on getting better, which is completely backwards. The mission Google Health and HealthVault set out to accomplish is now possible today. Prime users have imported over 50,000 health records in the last few months, so we've answered that question of whether consumers will want a consolidated health record on their mobile devices: yes, they do.

You're right, part of the trick of making this work would be to make sure there is value to the individual in whatever analysis gets done on their data. If they can tell you you're going to have a heart attack before it happens, then that's valuable. If the data gets siphoned off for the benefit of Merck or someone, not so much (although some people would agree to that in return for the occasional Starbucks gift card).

It strikes me that these mobile health integration platforms share the same broad goals as personal health records platforms like Microsoft HealthVault -- where HealthVault is the most widely used of the bunch but the category as a whole has never thrived. The question is whether consumers will be more interested in keeping a consolidated health record linked to their mobile device. The answer might be yes if more of the data gathering can be automated, rather than something they're expected to type into a web form.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.